Plotinus, On Whether the Stars Are Causes

PLOTINUS, ON WHETHER THE STARS ARE CAUSES

6. Is it not, then, wholly absurd that they should name one planet Ares and another Aphrodite, and hold that these commit adulteries when they stand in a particular relation to one another, filling them, one might say, with human licentiousness regarding the mutual desires

of human beings?

Or how could one admit that the sight of one another, when they behold each other in a certain way, gives them pleasure, yet that for them there is no limit at all? Indeed, at the very moment when countless living creatures are coming into being and exist, if they always produce some effect upon each one of these—bestowing fame upon them, making them rich, poor, or licentious, and themselves carrying out the actions of each one of them—what sort of life would this be for the planets?

How can they accomplish so many things? Moreover, the notion that they wait for the signs of the zodiac to appear and only then act, and that, according to how many degrees each one rises, so too are the years of its ascent, and that they count off on their fingers the time for when they will act, never acting before the completion of that interval—and, in general, the failure to attribute the governance of the universe to a higher principle, but rather to suppose that all things are owing to the planets, as though there were no single and sole overseer upon whom the whole depends, and who allows each thing to bring to completion, in accordance with its own nature, its proper work, and to carry out the task that belongs to it, harmonized once more with him—this notion, then, marks a man who wishes to abolish, and who is ignorant of, the nature of the cosmos, which is governed by one principle and by a primordial causality that embraces all things.

7. If, however, the planets give indications of things to come—as we say there are also many other things that furnish signs of what is destined to occur—what is the cause of the things that come to pass?

And what of the order of these events? Indeed, no signs would be given unless all things came to pass according to a certain order. Let us suppose, then, that this is something resembling letters which are forever being written in the heavens, or which are already written and move about, performing now one work and now another; and that from this there comes the indication of events, just as, through the unitary principle of a living creature, we might infer from one part of it about another. For in fact, by looking at the eyes of a man, or at some other part of his body, one can infer his character, the dangers that threaten him, and how to confront them. Those are parts, and we too are parts; therefore from the one we can learn about the other. All things are full of signs, and wise is he who from one thing learns about another. Many of these are already familiar and known to everyone. What, then, is this single and sole arrangement,

For in this way the signs we take from birds and from other animals will have a rational explanation. All things, then, must stand in mutual connection, and there must exist—not in some single one of the particulars—that which is rightly called «a single conspiration», but far more, and primarily, in the universe one principle must make the universe a single composite living creature, one and only, composed of all things; and just as in each creature its parts have each taken up a separate work of their own, so too the parts of the whole, each apart from the others, have their separate work to perform—and indeed this holds for the whole even more than for the parts, inasmuch as its parts are not merely parts but wholes, and greater than the parts of a particular thing. (goodnight)

Each thing, then, proceeds from a single principle and performs its own work, yet at the same time they cooperate with one another, since they are not severed from the whole; on the contrary, they act upon the others and are acted upon by the others, and the one comes toward the other bringing it pain or pleasure. And they come, indeed, not unplanned nor by chance; in truth, from these comes something else, and then again some further thing, according to the determinations of nature.

The soul, then, sets out to accomplish its work—for the soul that holds the position of principle does all things—and whether it walks the straight road or, again, turns aside, punishment follows for whatever happens within the universe; otherwise it would dissolve. But the universe is preserved eternally, since the whole is steered by the commands and the power of its lord. The stars cooperate with the whole as no negligible parts of the heaven, and hence they are proud signs. Thus they give signs of whatever happens in the sensible world, yet they are causes of other things—those, namely, of which they appear to be the causes. We, for our part, carry out the works of the soul in accordance with nature, so long as we are not lost amid the multiplicity of the whole; but if we are lost, our punishment is both the loss itself and the subsequent worsening of our condition. But if wealth and poverty are the contribution of external factors, what of virtue and vice?

Virtue is owing to the primordial condition of the soul, whereas vice is owing to the soul’s collusion with external things. But these matters we have spoken of elsewhere. .

9. Now let us bring to mind the «spindle» with which, as the ancients said, the Fates spin. According to Plato, the spindle is the wandering and the fixed part of the heavenly circular course, while the Fates and Necessity, their mother, turn and spin it at the birth of each one, and so everything that is born comes into becoming through Necessity.

In the Timaeus"" likewise, the creator God gave the «principle of the soul», while the revolving gods gave the «dread and necessary passions», the «fits of temper», the desires, the «pleasures, again, and the pains», and «the other kind of soul», the source of these passions. These narratives bind us to the stars, from which we take our soul, and, with our coming here, they subject us to necessity. From them too we take our characters; from these latter our actions spring forth, while from our emotional disposition our passions arise. Consequently, what remains to be the true We—we to whom nature has granted the power to be masters of our passions? Furthermore, amid the evils we receive through the body, God gave us «unconquerable virtue». Virtue, in truth, we do not need when we are at rest, but when we are in danger of falling into evil, in the absence of virtue. For this reason too «we must flee from here» and «separate» ourselves from whatever has been added to us afterward, so as not to be the composite thing, the ensouled body in which the bodily nature is sovereign—the nature that has received some trace of soul—so that the common life belongs principally to the body, since all that it has is bodily. But to the other soul, the one that lies outside the body, belongs the upward motion, toward the beautiful and the divine, over which no one holds mastery; this soul a man either uses, so as to be identified with it and to live through it, departing from himself, or, abandoned by it, he lives subject to fate—and in his case the stars do not merely give signs, but he himself becomes, one might say, a part, and follows the whole of which he is a part. Each one, after all, is twofold: on the one hand, something composite, and, on the other, his own self. And the whole cosmos, likewise, is in one part the composite that consists of the body and the soul bound to the body, and in another part it is the soul of the universe that lies outside the body, which sends like flashes its traces into the bodily soul. But the sun too and the heavenly bodies are in this way twofold; in the other soul, the pure one, they give no evil at all, but also in whatever comes into the universe from them, inasmuch as they are parts of the universe and ensouled bodies, their body, which is a part, gives it to some other part, while its purpose looks toward the star and its truly own soul toward the Best. The other things happen in sequence to this, or rather not to this but to those things that are around it, like the heat that from fire spreads out over the whole; and perhaps something proceeds from the soul of one star toward another soul akin to it. The negative effects are owing to the mixture. For the nature of this whole is «commingling», so that, if one were to isolate the separate soul from it, what would remain would be nothing great. The universe, then, is a god, if we reckon in the separate soul as a part of it, while the remainder, says Plato, is «a great daemon», and whatever is made manifest within it is daemonic.

10. If the foregoing holds, we must accept, even in the present case, that the stars are able to give signs, but that their activities have no universal character nor proceed from their totality; rather, they are connected with the manifestations within the universe and in relation to what remains of them. The soul, we must admit, even before it arrives at becoming, brings something of its own as it comes, since it would not arrive at the body if it did not have some great passive element. Let us admit, furthermore, that it enters the realm of chance in accordance with the very revolution of the heaven; and we must admit, finally, that this revolution manifests its action by cooperating and by completing, with its own power, those things that must [be done in?] the universe—a process in which each heavenly body has taken up the position of a part.